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Recently I've been noticing a few of these, using Flash and layers. I'm not sure if I agree with you that they are less annoying, but they are definately cool. Of course, like everything else give them a month or two and they will no longer be seen as cool- just another nuisance. I've seen a couple ads done like this for the movie Harry Potter, where a bat flies out of the ad and goes around the page, then back into the ad to move the user's attention to it. On another site some type of car drove across the page. Very clever.

I think those ads will start to appear more and more, and they will get less and less appealing. Sounds are distracting, and if they have no close button, they really suck. That was the only good part about popups, you could close them immediately.

I like the ads that have an animation that returns to a banner. It gains the users attraction without blocking your site's content, at least not for very long.

TheOnion.com has a preety nice ad running. The pink one. When you roll over it, a larger ad appears below it. That woudl be the ultimate banner, but it's just SO UGLY!

I did some experimenting to see how this was done, Can get it to work great in IE5.5 using layers and flash in wmode=transparent but fails miserably in netscape4.7 obviously.
Noticed that the eyeblaster sites they list actualy work in NS4.7 (ie you can see the animation over the page) but it permanently obscures all the links on the page too. Even when the animation is done. So Im guessing they do use some sort of full screen layer too.
The method I came up with doesnt show anything in NS so might even be a better idea LOL. Now to try run it from an external .js or maybe even as a php ad runner. I'll probably never use it but fun to play with still

LOL, well that was really bugging me for a while how eyeblaster managed to get the transparent effects of flash to work in netscape ..because it just doesnt support it. Figured it out
When you select one of their demos using netscape it takes you to nothing more than a flash movie with the original background html taken as a screenshot and pasted into flash. They had me fooled for a few there, thinking they had done the impossible. Mayeb a little bit of false advertising?
While I was playing with it all though I saw a way to do a similar type of thing using images and dhtml that is supported by netscape too.

The parent company of eyeblast actually contacted me about advertising on my mailing list. I had to say no based on the pure evilness of it all (well no.. I didn't exactly pass... I just raised my rated to $250/CPM. I'd be more than happy at those rates. )